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Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

Part Three: Chapters IX–X

Key Facts

1.

But
what can you do when you have to deal with people?

This question is uttered on many occasions
by Dr. Stadler, first in Part One, Chapter VII. The question demonstrates
his and the looters’ belief that people are generally irrational
and must be dealt with in a manipulative or repressive manner. Stadler
believes most people are incapable of rational thought and must
be told what is best for them. He believes they will support pure
thought only if it is government-sanctioned, and this is why he
has supported the creation of the State Science Institute. As the
story progresses, this view of people becomes a justification for
the increasing power of the government and its adoption of brute
force. The question is also stated by Dr. Floyd Ferris
at the unveiling of Project X. While coercing Stadler to deliver
his speech praising the monstrous machine, Ferris reminds him that
at a time of hysteria, riots, and mass violence, the people must
be kept in line by any means necessary. He underscores his message
by quoting the question Stadler himself is known for asking.

2.

Contradictions
do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction,
check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Francisco says this to Dagny in Part
One, Chapter VII, when she challenges him for squandering his talent
as a worthless playboy. Dagny asks him how he can be such a paradox,
how a man as capable, brilliant, and accomplished as he is can also
choose to be a worthless playboy. It does not seem possible that
he can be both, and yet he seems to be. In asking her to check her
premises, Francisco suggests that it is indeed not possible. He
cannot be both things at once, because contradictions cannot exist.
A thing is what it is, not something else entirely. Therefore, there
must be another answer that Dagny has not seen yet. Hugh Akston
(who had been Francisco’s teacher) says something similar to Dagny
when she meets him at the diner where he works as a short-order
cook. He tells her this in response to her disbelief over why a
famous philosopher would choose to work in a diner, or why a motor
with the power to revolutionize industry would be abandoned in ruins.
He urges her to look beyond her assumptions in the search for an answer
that could make sense.

3.

John
Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being
torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of
the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the
day when men withdraw their vultures.

Francisco says this to Dagny in Part
Two, Chapter V, after they discover the words “Who is John Galt?”
scratched into a table at a restaurant. She says there are so many
stories about him, and Francisco tells her that all the stories
are true. Metaphorically speaking, they are, and Francisco’s Prometheus
story is especially apt. Prometheus was a figure from Greek mythology.
He was a titan who stole fire from the gods and brought it to men
to improve their lives. In return, he was chained to a rock and
tortured. Vultures ate his liver each day, only to have it grow
back at night to be eaten again. In Francisco’s comment, Prometheus
(personified by Galt) represents the great industrialists who have
provided men with prosperity and improved their lives with their
inventions and products, but have received only condemnation and
government interference in return. These men, led by Galt, have
disappeared and taken their prosperity-generating minds (the “fire”
they had provided) with them. They will no longer allow themselves
to receive torture as payment for their talents, and they will only
return their talents to the world when they are no longer punished
for bringing them.

4.

I
swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the
sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

This is the oath the thinkers recite
when they join the strike and come to live in the valley; we first
encounter this oath in Part Three, Chapter I. No one may stay until
he or she is willing to take the oath freely. Dagny first encounters
it as an inscription on the building where Galt’s motor is kept.
The words are so powerful that the sound of Galt reciting them opens
the locks of the building’s door. When Dagny sees the inscription,
she tells Galt this is already the code she lives by, but she does
not think his way is the right way to practice the code. He tells
her they will have to see which one of them is right. Later, when
it is clear that Galt’s way was right, Dagny solemnly recites the
oath to Francisco in the Taggart Terminal just before they rescue
Galt from the looters, in Part Three, Chapter IX. The striker’s
code presents Rand’s belief in egoism, or the doctrine of rational
self-interest. Rand believes that individuals have an inalienable
right to pursue their own happiness based on their own values and
that they must be free to pursue their own self-interest as they
choose. Under this code, people have no obligations to each other
beyond the obligation to respect the freedom and rights of other
self-interested people.

5.

Centuries
ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your
philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence
and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have
never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete
it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

This passage is part of the radio broadcast
delivered by John Galt to the people of America in Part Three, Chapter
VII. The man he refers to is the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle,
whose work had a profound influence on Rand and her philosophy of
Objectivism. The concept that A is A was put forth in Aristotle’s
Law of Identity, where he held that everything that exists has a
specific nature and a single identity. A can only be A; it cannot
also be B. For Galt (embodying Rand’s philosophy), this means that
things exist: they are what they are regardless of the nature of
the observer. Even if a person wants A to be something else or believes
it should be something else, it is still A. The work of a person’s
consciousness is to perceive reality in its objective sense, to
identify and recognize it as what it is, not to invent an alternate
reality. Galt and the thinkers he represents are rational and perceive
the reality that is, while the looters try, through denial, coercion,
and manipulation, to assert an alternate reality that cannot be.